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Jan 24 Train Anywhere | lululemon

We pack our gym shoes for weekend getaways and tuck them into our holiday suitcases with the best intentions. If we’re being honest, that’s often where they stay until we unpack them again, back at home. Anna Farrant and Jordan Bowers, owners of Vancouver-based All-City Athletics fitness and boxing, say the key to those shoes seeing the light of day is to make a workout a morning ritual—even just for 20 minutes.

“You have to wake up, go to the bathroom and, before you brush your teeth, get on the floor and do your push-ups,” says Bowers. “If you think about it, you don’t do it. It’s so easy not to do it. The payoff of 20 minutes is big, but the hardest part is trying to do it.”

Farrant says a training app, like Tabata Stopwatch Pro, is an easy way to structure a self-guided workout and keep it moving along smoothly without distractions. “A timer, a workout partner, or a pre-set routine that you write down on paper or on your phone—something that holds you accountable to make you actually do it is the key, even if that partner is someone you can just shoot a text or video of your daily workout,” she says. “Twenty minutes is realistic and there’s a lot you can get done in that time if you’re working hard enough. Sometimes it’s just that little thing [to hold you accountable] that inspires you to do more.”

A typical tabata workout consists of eight rounds of 20 seconds of hard work with 10-second breaks in between. The 16-minute workout below, separated into four four-minute series, is simple, and mix-and-matches different exercises and heart rate elevators.

“This is the stuff that gets your heart rate up really high, paired with some strength exercises. So you feel like you really got that bang for your buck,” says Farrant.

Check out this All-City Athletics workout, which can be done anywhere you’ve got your gym shoes.